ICE Just Abandoned Its Dream of “Extreme Vetting” Software that Could Predict Whether a Foreigner Visitor Would Become a Terrorist: (“Federal immigration officials have abandoned their pursuit of a controversial machine-learning technology that was a pillar of the Trump administration’s “extreme vetting” of foreign visitors, dealing a reality check to the goal of using artificial intelligence to predict human behavior. * * * Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told tech-industry contractors last summer they wanted a system for their “Extreme Vetting Initiative” that could automatically mine Facebook, Twitter and the broader Internet to determine whether a visitor might commit criminal or terrorist acts or was a “positively contributing member of society.”)

Republicans Escalate Bitter Fight over Judicial Nominations: (“With little else moving on Capitol Hill, Mr. McConnell; the White House; and Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, have turned confirmation of federal judges into their overriding priority. And in severely weakening the power of the blue slip, they have greatly diminished the ability of Democrats to stop them.”)

CIA “Leaker” Josh Schulte Posted Agency Code Online—and CIA Never Noticed: (“Joshua Adam Schulte, the former CIA worker suspected of passing the agency’s hacking secrets to WikiLeaks, previously posted the source code for an internal CIA tool to his account on the public code-sharing site GitHub, The Daily Beast has learned. * * * That potential red flag was apparently missed by the spy agency just months after Edward Snowden walked out of the National Security Agency with a thumb drive of secrets in 2013. A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment.”)